Dream Demon<\/em> began as a blatant attempt to capitalize on topical material and then-recent successes at the box office, but the parade of filmmakers who contributed to it eventually turned it into its own unique film. After seeing the impressive box office returns of Wes Craven\u2019s A Nightmare on Elm Street<\/em> (1984), that movie\u2019s UK distributor, Palace Pictures, sought to essentially make their own version for their market. They were serendipitously approached by three filmmakers who already had an idea for a film entitled Dream Demon<\/em>: David Pirie, Richard Rayner, and Chris Petit, the latter having recent success directing 1979\u2019s Radio On<\/em>. The trio and Palace attempted to get the film off the ground for several years with no luck, despite their best efforts. Producer Stephen Wooley then approached director Harley Cokeliss, who\u2019d just completed a pair of action movies in Black Moon Rising<\/em> (1986) and Malone<\/em> (1987), convincing Cokeliss to direct the film as well as rewrite it from scratch with Christopher Wicking (a third writer, Catherine de Pury, came on board later to polish dialogue). According to Pirie, Rayner and Petit, the script was rewritten so extensively that they turned down credit. While information about the initial draft is sketchy, it\u2019s possible that the Princess Diana allusions were already present, and Cokeliss and his team not only kept them, but added to them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The final version of Dream Demon<\/em> is a melange of A Nightmare on Elm Street<\/em> dream logic, Hellraiser<\/em>-style labyrinthine landscapes, and classic ghost story tropes. In the midst of a series of disturbing dreams about her life, Diana meets an American girl, Jenny (Kathleen Wilhoite), who feels a connection to the house that Diana has just moved into. Soon, Jenny is sharing Diana\u2019s dream space, the two young women seeing visions of past events involving a little girl (Annabelle Lanyon) being menaced by her father (Nickolas Grace). Meanwhile, a pair of muckraking sleazy tabloid rag employees (Spencer<\/em> co-star Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail), both of whom start out hounding Diana for exclusive salacious tidbits about her life and her Falklands war hero fianc\u00e9, Oliver (Mark Greenstreet), become somehow possessed or claimed by the house and Diana\u2019s dreams, slowly transforming into demonic versions of themselves. Jenny and Diana make the discovery that the girl they keep seeing visions of is in fact a young Jenny, and the freeing of the girl\u2019s \u201cspirit\u201d allows Jenny to reconcile her past trauma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dream Demon<\/em> would be rather simple to understand, albeit rote, if the film was merely Jenny\u2019s story. It\u2019s the fact that Diana is not only present but the clear lead of the movie that gives the film such a compelling oddness. If Jenny\u2019s arc involves freeing herself from the trauma of her past, Diana\u2019s acts as a sort of wish fulfillment for the real Diana Spencer, especially when taking into account the eerie prescience of the character. Cokeliss, Wicking and de Pury make their Diana an on-the-nose doppelg\u00e4nger for the Princess of Wales, presenting her as an upper class schoolteacher engaged to a lauded member of the aristocracy. As the marriage of the real Diana and Charles was being revealed to be one fraught with infidelity in the late \u201880s, so the filmmakers made Oliver a philanderer, undermining Diana\u2019s sense of safety as her reality crumbles. Diana\u2019s befriending of Jenny and determination to save the ghostly young girl could be read as representative of Princess Diana\u2019s extensive charity work, especially her focus on children. While it was already abundantly clear that Princess Diana\u2019s life was beset by the media, there\u2019s no way the filmmakers could\u2019ve known about the future circumstances of her demise, caused in part by aggressive paparazzi tactics. The fact that the film\u2019s chief \u201cdemons\u201d that threaten Diana are a reporter and his photographer feels like a spooky, astute warning for the real Diana. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dream Demon<\/em> is a frustratingly uneven film\u2014it can\u2019t quite marry the stories of the two women together properly, its supernatural \u201crules\u201d are vague and inconsistent, and the movie\u2019s out of place original theatrical ending even lets its villains off the hook (the newly released Director\u2019s Cut fixes this but remains unsatisfying in other ways). Yet it deserves consideration as\u00a0 an engaging horror movie that\u2019s distinctly British despite being made by an American, and that identity is owed to the Diana character and the allusions to the real Princess. In retrospect, the film acts as a fairy-tale, \u201cwhat if\u201d ode to Diana Spencer in a similar way as Once Upon a Time\u2026in Hollywood<\/em> (2019) does for Sharon Tate. Dream Demon<\/em>\u2019s Diana defeats her paparazzi enemies, helps the innocent, and literally knocks the head off of her insufferable fianc\u00e9. Clearly, it would be hard for any other Princess Diana biopic to beat that. “Dream Demon” is available on Blu-ray<\/a> from Arrow Video, and streaming on their Arrow Player streaming service<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/dream-demon2-1024x553.png\")
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